The reception of Adam Smith in Japan: the formation of the idea of Shimin Shakai, or civil society, by Zenya Takashima before the end of World War II

Shinji Nohara

No jkphm, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: From the 1930s to the end of World War II, the Japanese government restricted freedom of expression and research. Nevertheless, Zenya Takashima (1904-1990), one of the most influential social scientists in Japan, continued to publish his writings. On an initial reading, he seems to have supported totalitarianism, even though he did not; moreover, he seemed to have agreed with a model of a controlled economy as a historical step, although he did not see this as inevitable. Rather, in order to resist the totalitarian ideology, he adopted a Smithian view of Shimin Shakai, or civil society, in which people, by protecting justice, acted freely in the economy. Before Takashima, the concept of civil society was used to express the German concept "bürgerliche Gesellschaft," but Takashima changed the meaning of the term to a society of equal citizens.

Date: 2021-03-26
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/605e3efc22950300dd6ea84a/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:jkphm

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/jkphm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().